The Duran

Why is China choosing to partner with Israel and Saudi Arabia?

Why is China choosing to partner with Israel and Saudi Arabia?

China’s reaching out to Israel and Saudi Arabia is not a case of selling out to Zionism and Wahhabism. It is the product of a pragmatic conception of statesmanship intended to lay the foundations for a multipolar world.

Far away from the public eye and amidst relatively little fanfare compared to other official visits of leaders elsewhere across the world, both the Saudi King and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu were both just recently in China to clinch dozens of deals.

The mainstream media reported on these events, though they were conspicuously absent from most coverage by alt-media. There’s a fair chance that it might just be coincidence, and that small teams of journalists with limited resources only chose to focus on the most pressing worldwide issues, of which there are many, or it could be due to something else, and that’s the “political correctness” which has recently become a driving force in the online multipolar information community.

There are a few axiomatic truths which are generally prevalent in most alt-media reporting, and the two most relevant ones are that Israel is a fake, unjustly established, geopolitical entity, and that the Saudis are the main exporters of terrorism all across the world.

I agree with these assertions, but that’s beside the point, because what this article plans to focus on is China’s flourishing partnerships with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, which are practically ignored by the alt-media community.

I suspect that this has something to do with the “politically correct” “thinking” that the “gatekeepers” impose by “reasoning” that it is “bad for overall morale” to focus on these relationships, and that – like with Russia’s excellentties with Israel – there “must be a secret explanation”, potentially one in which China is just “too smart and clever” for Netanyahu and King Salman, so that it has found an innovative way to beat them at their own game, while wondrously helping the Palestinians at the same time.

As attractive a conspiracy theory as such a narrative might be for the individuals who are drunk on this wishful thinking, alas, it doesn’t at all represent the reality.

The goal of this article is to break through the “political correctness” that alt-media “gatekeepers” have implemented in the community by explaining what China – one of the leading catalysts of the emerging multipolar World Order – sees of benefit in partnering so closely with the US’ two most privileged allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

To that end, the first part of this article reviews the latest developments in Chinese-Israeli relations, while the second one looks at the rapidly developing ties between Beijing and Riyadh.

Finally, the last part syncretises the former two in order to produce a set of “politically incorrect” conclusions which describe the real nature of China’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

Netanyahu’s New Friend

(1) Rolling Out The Red Carpet In Red China:

The Israeli leader just concluded his very important trip to China this week, during which time some very symbolic statements of intent were expressed between him and his host.

Reuters reported that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang reminded everybody that “The Chinese people and the Jewish people are both great peoples of the world”, with The Diplomat emphasising Netanyahu’s declaration that Chinese-Israeli ties are “a marriage made in heaven”.

Apart from the high-sounding rhetoric, both sides engaged in talks about boosting their technological-security cooperation with one another, with observers noting that China is one of Israel’s largest trade partners.

Correspondingly, Netanyahu asked his counterparts to allow Israeli companies greater market access for their high-tech goods in the country in exchange for inviting more Chinese investment to Israel.

While no details were revealed about what sort of security cooperation the two sides discussed, it can be assumed that intelligence sharing and general briefings about both parties’ attitude towards relevant regional affairs were on the agenda.

(2) The Silk Road Comes To Israel:

Naïve observers, especially those under the influence of ideological dogmatism, are at a loss for words to cohesively explain why China is striking Silk Road deals with “the devil”, but the “inconvenient truth” is that China makes no value judgments whatsoever in regards to its international partners, hence why Beijing doesn’t see Netanyahu as an evil figure but a “pragmatic and shrewd businessman” presiding over a geo-strategically important strip of territory.

Netanyahu revealed in an interview with the Times of Israel that he discussed the so-called “Red-Med Railway” with China during his trip, which, just as the name implies, will connect the Red Sea with the Mediterranean via Eliat and Ashdod.

The pertinent point that I expressed in these article was that the Chinese are globally respected for always thinking many steps ahead and for preparing reliable backup plans for all of their investments, and the One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity is no exception.

China is well aware of the geo-strategic vulnerability of the Suez Canal, and thus has an urgent self-interest in building the prospective Red-Med line in order to ensure that Beijing’s maritime connectivity with Europe is never threatened by future hostilities with the US.

The People’s Republic is building the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as a workaround for avoiding the bottlenecked Strait of Malacca chokepoint, and Beijing’s forthcoming military base in Djibouti will safeguard the Bab el Mandab.

The only missing node in guaranteeing the security of China’s Sea Lines of Communication and “String of Pearls” is the Suez Canal, for which the Red-Med Railway is envisioned as providing the ideal logistical solution.

In addition, the only wars which could disrupt the maritime portion of OBOR and that China predicts it will ever have to worry about would in one way or another concern the US, and it’s absolutely unforeseeable that Washington would militarily turn on Tel Aviv. Therefore Chinese decision makers wisely believe that Israel will remain free from anti-OBOR Hybrid War activity, which explains Beijing’s interest in investing in the Red-Med Railway.

(3) Networking:

China and Israel both expect to gain something intangible from their enhanced partnership with one another.

Tel Aviv wants Beijing to passively support it in the UN, while China might hope that the powerful and perceivably omnipotent Israeli lobby in the West could more convincingly promote China’s interests in that civilisational sphere than its own influence-makers ever could.

In practice, Israel wants China to abstain from voting for hostile UN resolutions against it and to progressively disengage from dealing with the Palestinian issue, whilst China would like Israeli lobbyists to make sure that the EU and US don’t enact any anti-Chinese trade policies.

Both of these goals are highly ambitious and not likely to bear any fruit, let alone in the short term, but they nonetheless remain powerful motivators for bringing Israel and China together in an intangible way beyond their growing New Silk Road cooperation.

Salman Seeks Out The Silk Road

(1) Eastern Allure:

Switching gears and turning towards Chinese-Saudi relations, King Salman just signed $65 billion worth of deals in the People’s Republic. The robust set of agreements covers everything from infrastructure development, military cooperation, finance, and energy, and it was with a sigh of relief that Salman concluded these deals. His country is bleeding tens of billions of dollars each year as a result of the global energy price glut and the costly War of Terror on Yemen, so Saudi Arabia could use all of the help that it can get right now to remain standing on its own two feet and not implode in the coming years.

Although Saudi Arabia is an energy exporting-dependent economy, the Kingdom has sought to begin a lengthy and painful diversification through the unveiling of its structural reform program marketed as “Vision 2030”, which interestingly looks to be a perfect complementarity to OBOR.

Riyadh wants to fundamentally transform its economy into a “normal” one within the next 15 years, and the only way that it can even come close to that is through Chinese investment in the real-sector (commercial, manufacturing) parts of the economy.

I described the general way in which this could happen in the article that I co-authored late last year for the Moscow-based Katehon think tank about how “China Chases Markets In The Mideast”, during which time I highlighted the attractiveness of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province for Chinese entrepreneurs. If the workers there can be steadily transitioned out of the energy and public sectors, then they would make up a suitably large enough labour pool to work on New Silk Road projects there.

Aside from anchor investments such as factories and other such production facilities, there are two interconnected initiatives which have really caught the Chinese’s eye.

China is very interested in promoting physical connectivity across countries and regions, and for this purpose Beijing is likely considering expansion of its coastal investments in Oman’s Duqm port in order to link them to the other countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The most feasible way in which this could be achieved is by breathing new life into the stalematedGCCRailway project through an influx of Chinese capital.

It might sound like a crazy idea for China to potentially invest billions of dollars into a desert railway, but the logic behind such a decision is driven by concrete economic and strategic factors. As was explained when discussing the Red-Med Railway in Israel, China is always trying to build back up plans to support its main projects, and the spearheading of an overland transport route from the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea would circumvent the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint and bestow Beijing with direct and unimpeded access to the GCC’s energy (and, if the New Silk Road plans are successful, commercial/manufacturing) resources.

It was described in an earlier part of this article how China wisely calculates that the greatest global threat to OBOR comes from US-designed Hybrid War schemes, and just as China doesn’t foresee the US ever attacking or destabilising Israel as part of this strategy, so too does China not envisage Washington attacking the Gulf Cooperation Council. This translates into making the GCC Railway as secure a long-term investment for China as the Red-Med railway is or at least appears to be according to the prevailing logic of the day.

(2) Protecting The Caravans:

The next point that needs to be analysed when discussing Chinese-Saudi relations are the military ties between these two ideologically separate – and it can be argued, even contradictory – countries.

It is here where I’ll do what scarcely any alt-media analyst has done beforehand, and humbly recognise that I was wrong when I analysed this topic almost a year ago for the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies. In my article “Pakistan And India ‘Trade Off’ Allies, KSA And China Start A Cold War”, I wrote that Beijing and Riyadh were moving onto a collision course with one another, postulating that the US would use its allies in the Wahhabi Kingdom to sow the seeds of disruptive Hybrid war terrorism all across OBOR’s transit states in order to sabotage this world-changing series of projects.

I admittedly was under the influence of “wishful thinking” and had “drank the Kool-Aid” to an extent, in that I sincerely believed that China and Saudi Arabia would never pragmatically cooperate with one another outside of their producer-customer energy relationship. Like many alt-media individuals are prone to do, I projected my own personal principles and value system onto China, falsely seeing “moral limits” where there were only cold, hard interests.

As time has revealed, my earlier forecast didn’t pan out the way that I originally anticipated, and in fact has since followed the opposite direction, which suggests that the public (and presumably, also private) deals which had been reached between the two countries were sufficient to get the Saudis to ensure that the Wahhabi terrorists under their control (which, to be clear, aren’t all of the terrorists in the world anymore) won’t attack the OBOR projects.

Interestingly, not only is Saudi Arabia poised to give China a Silk Road stake all along the southern shores of the Persian Gulf, but Beijing has even been selling military drone technology to Riyadh, despite the obvious possibility that these weapons could be (and likely already have been) used in the War of Terror on Yemen.

An agreement was struck in September 2016 whereby a Chinese company was tasked with providing these unmanned systems to the Saudis, and King Salman’s recent visit to the People’s Republic netted him a deal which will see Chinese drones produced right inside of his Kingdom.

I have my own personal reservations about the wisdom of this decision, but then again, if Russia is seriously considering selling S-400 missiles to NATO-member Turkey, then how comparatively bad is it that China wants to produce drones in Saudi Arabia?

(3) Forgetting About Yemen:

Both Ankara and Riyadh were, and to an extent still are, the US’ chief allies in executing the War of Terror on Syria, even though each of these countries’ geopolitical loyalties have somewhat shifted to varying degrees since the start of that conflict.

It is not my intent to focus on this imperialist tragedy in the present article. However, I do feel compelled to make an unpopular but factual point about the War of Terror on Yemen. This is not intended to “absolve” China’s decision to sell drones to the Saudis or “apologise” for it, but simply to explain how some of the most prominent state actors with the Multipolar Community view what is happening there.

Believe it or not, neither the 2015 nor the 2016 BRICS Declarations contained a single word about Yemen, so it is clear that those five countries don’t collectively care enough about the war in Yemen to allow it to interfere with their “19th-Century Great Power Chessboard” interactions with their peers.

It’s not my job to explain why the BRICS have failed two years in a row to include Yemen in their collective declarations, but one could cynically suggest that it might be because they calculate that it would be risky for them to flagrantly get on the Saudis’ bad side.

Russia’s valiant and effective anti-terrorist intervention in Syria was infinitely more detrimental to Saudi Arabia’s “interests” than any rhetorical BRICS statement about Yemen would be, but the difference is that the Saudis are able to understand the reasons why Russia decided to become involved in Syria (irrespective of whatever claims the Saudis make to the contrary) whereas Russia and the other BRICS states realise that leading the charge in collectively condemning the Saudis for their crimes in Yemen, however morally justified or correct it might be, would be an unnecessary, unacceptable and ultimately pointless provocation of Riyadh.

Since the War of Terror on Yemen has begun the BRICS’ silence on Yemen (in terms of their collective response, not individual statements, of which Russia has issued severalpowerfulones) might have served some of their Great Power interests.

For example, Russia was able to cut an historic production deal with OPEC, and Sputnik reported in both 2015 and 2016 that Moscow was in talks with Riyadh over possible weapons deliveries, though nothing has been agreed to as of yet. Neither of these discussions might have been possible had the Saudis refused to talk with the Russians because of what could have only been predicted to be their overwhelming anger if Moscow was responsible for a BRICS statement on Yemen.

As for India, Prime Minister Modi has done everything that he can to intensify relations between New Delhi and Riyadh in order to advance his country’s energy interests and to try to wean the Kingdom away from its historical alliance with India’s arch-rival Pakistan. In fact, Prime Minister Modi was even awarded Saudi Arabia’s highest civilian honour during his trip to the Kingdom last year, and earlier this month it was reported thatSaudi Arabia and India will explore possibilities for joint production of defence equipment and technologies.

As for China, I have already discussed its interests in forging closer relations with Saudi Arabia earlier in this article.

As “politically incorrect” as it is to say, and fully accepting that this will trigger dismay amongst many in the alt-media ocmmunity, the harsh truth is that China and the rest of BRICS have largely forgotten about Yemen because it is not to their long-term and high-level advantage vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia to take tangible steps to relieve this beleaguered country’s suffering. Beijing – and possibly also New Delhi soon – is even going so far as to sell drones to Riyadh which will only make the war worse.

How Multipolar Works With Unipolarity

It’s now time to explain how one of the most effective multipolar engines of the unfolding world order implicitly justifies its growing robust cooperation with two of the unipolar camp’s most steadfast proponents.

It sounds paradoxical, and some people will probably never understand it because they refuse to acknowledge any of the “inconvenient facts” which I elaborated above, but it is indeed theoretically (key word) possible for multipolar and unipolar leaders to engage in (at least perceived) “win-win” cooperation with one another, which I explained in detail in my book-length article series at Katehon about “The Meaning Of Multipolarity”.

The gist is that if both sides find a way to focus on important areas of mutual interests, then they run the chance of expanding their partnership into something much broader and improving the possibility that they can overcome their preexisting bilateral obstacles.

Of course, such a strategic concept works a lot better on paper than it does in real life, but there are still plenty of examples of it occurring within various bounds.

Take for instance how Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela sold oil to the country which its revolutionary leader inferred was ruled by Satan, or how President Putin initially supported the US’ 2001 War on Afghanistan and even allowed the Pentagon to set up bases in Central Asia for this purpose.

There is also China, which had its record-breaking modernisation and economic development greatly facilitated by US investment, after which Beijing turned around and paid back the favour by investing in the US dollar through Treasury bonds.

India on the other hand has gone way too far and can no longer be said to be “balancing” or entering into “pragmatic” relations with the US, but is now instead a de-facto military-strategic ally of Washington through LEMOA and Congress’ related designation of India as the US’s first-ever “Major Defense Partner”.

Being soberly aware of the practical limitations and inherent risks whenever multipolar actors seek cooperation with their unipolar counterparts, let’s take a look at how China applies this policy towards Israel and Saudi Arabia, keeping in mind what was explained earlier in the text in order to form a holistic strategic concept which describes Beijing’s approach to both of them:

1. No Historical-Political Baggage:

For better or (as most of the people in the alt-media community would say) for worse, China does not hold any of its present or future partners to account for their historical or political problems. Beijing does not think that it is up to China to serve justice for perceived or even actual wrongs, let alone halfway across the world and in disputes which China has never had any role in. As a result China has strictly abided by a uniform policy for decades whereby it avoids interference in the domestic affairs of its partners.

That being said, if a given actor isn’t partnered with Beijing or not on positive terms with it, then the aforesaid rule may not necessarily apply, such as was the context in the Old Cold War when Beijing didn’t have normal diplomatic relations with either Tel Aviv or Riyadh.

The world has dramatically transformed since that epoch, and a series of seemingly never-ending paradigm shifts are taking place all across the globe nowadays, two of which have been the progressive deepening of the Chinese-Israeli andChinese-Saudi partnerships. Although beginning to ‘bloom’ at different times in the post-Cold War period, both of these interconnected relationships have begun to finally bear visible fruit during Netanyahu’s and Salman’s visits to the People’s Republic earlier this month.

Since the international situation has so fundamentally changed over the past quarter of a century, all sides appear to have agreed that it is better to “let bygones be bygones” and to move beyond the historical-political baggage of their pasts.

In line with this, China also doesn’t allow the Palestinian, Syrian, Yemeni, or Iranian issues to interfere with its bilateral relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, preferring to leave such international historical-political “baggage” out of the mix as well.

2. Great Power Balancing:

China’s ability to look past its partners’ historical-political “baggage” (both in terms of bilateral and international relations) enables it to more flexibly engage in Great Power balancing.

The “19th-Century Great Power Chessboard” was alluded to earlier in the work, and it’s now time to describe what exactly was meant by that. I previously wrote about this in an extensive analysis for Regional Rapport when referring to the “worst-case” scenario pertaining to the Russian-written “draft constitution” for Syria.

At the time I explained this term as meaning that Russia (or any Great Power for that matter) cares more about its relations with its similarly sized/influential peers than it cares about the interests of its small- and medium-sized partners, the latter of whom are essentially negotiable pawns in a larger neo-realist game of power and interests that the Great Power is playing in order to advance “the greater good” (as the Great Power perceives it to be at any given moment).

I also referred to this concept in another article for Regional Rapport focusing on Russia’s new Balkan strategy, particularly in regards to its developing rapprochement with Serbia’s arch-enemy Croatia.

With all this in mind, it makes sense why President Xi visited Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt during his Middle East tour last year, since he clearly wanted to avoid the perception that he was favouring one or other of these countries at the expense of the rest but instead wanted everyone to see that China was seeking to strike a balance between the three.

Correspondingly, China’s balancing act on the “19th-Century Great Power Chessboard” – and Russia’s too for that matter – is not aimed against anyone, but is laser-focused on the pursuit of improving bilateral relations for what is conceived to be (as China sees it) “the greater good”.

3. Silk Road Strategies:

Picking up where the last part left off, China’s “greater good” is for the rest of the world to participate in OBOR, which Beijing truly believes will radically transform the nature of international relations by making it more fair, just, and balanced.

The idea is that the more stakeholders there are in this global project, the more secure and resistant to Hybrid War sabotage it will be, thereby boosting its chances of successfully changing the world by connecting all interested parties together by means of Chinese-financed transport infrastructure.

China’s traditional multipolar partners of Russia, Pakistan, and Iran occupy centre stage in this visionary formulation, but per the above Great Power Balancing, this doesn’t mean that Beijing wants to exclude other parties, as OBOR is open for all to take part in it.

This is why China is reaching out to Israel and Saudi Arabia in order to involve itself in their own nationally relevant projects for the New Silk Road which – as coincidence would have it – in both cases happen to have a very high geo-strategic priority for Beijing. The Red-Med Railway will help to avoid any potential disruptions along the Suez Canals, while the GCC Railway will do the same for the Strait of Hormuz.

China is betting – whether rightly or wrongly, wisely or naively – that bringing Israel and Saudi Arabia onboard OBOR will help to moderate their foreign policies and make them less likely to partake in any of the US’ proposed destabilisation schemes against this ambitious initiative.

It is still way too early to say whether that will ultimately be the outcome or not, but the fact remains that this is Beijing’s most likely intention.

Concluding Thoughts

This article aimed to answer the question about what China has been up to in feting the Israeli and Saudi leaders, something which might seem odd and even surprising to the casual observer, but which upon subsequent examination actually carries with it a very strong degree of strategic foresight.

There is actually nothing which should ordinarily be controversial about Beijing’s latest geo-strategic breakthroughs with Tel Aviv and Riyadh, but the problems begin to appear once ideologically zealous and politically dogmatic “gatekeepers” start to chime in on what is happening. The alt-media community is one in which there are several layers of “access control”, though most of them are in one way or another influenced to varying degrees by the prevailing notion of “political correctness”, which is usually interpreted as opposing Zionism and Wahhabism.

The issue however is that the “gatekeepers” haven’t really defined what the opposite of that is, or in other words, how to qualify one action or another as being Zionist or Wahhabi “collaboration”. Is it conducting trade with their related geopolitical entities? Is it signing military deals? Is it in fighting in wars for them? All three of these or maybe none of them?

The reason why uncertainties so powerfully linger and no final say on this has been clearly expressed is because “political correctness” usually isn’t openly described or even recognised as such, since doing so would paradoxically be “politically incorrect”. The shadowy world of symbols and signals that emerges in such a mess means that the “gatekeepers” have a large degree of leeway in liberally and arbitrarily interpreting Zionist and Wahhabi “collaboration” however they want, which could mean all sorts of nasty things such as attacking people who even talk about any multipolar countries’ ties with these ideologies’ affiliated entities.

“Political correctness” can only be sustained in an information vacuum and under conditions of absolute totalitarianism, which are impossible to indefinitely uphold in 2017, so any system of control based on this outdated anti-intellectual tool is bound to come up against multiple challenges sooner than later, especially given the pace at which paradigm shifts are unfolding all across the world right now.

It might have been possible to dismiss or bury Russia’s relations with Israel and China’s relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia in the 1990s or early 2000s, but there’s no way that President Putin’s very close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu can be ignored when the latter’s visits to Moscow come in the midst of the Middle East’s meltdown and are widely reported about in “official” (publicly financed) alt-media outlets like Sputnik and RT.

Similarly, it is impossible to ignore Netanyahu and Salman’s visits to Beijing at a time when China is the US’s chief economic rival and is engaged in the globally transformative OBOR initiative, to say nothing of Xinhua and other “official” Chinese alt-media organisations proudly broadcasting the latest news from these trips.

Eventually, the “non-official” alt-media “gatekeepers” will be forced to confront these overlapping pairs of relationships, though they’ll be unable to “excuse” them because they “violate” the “politically correct” ideological dogmas of not “collaborating” with Zionists or Wahhabis.

What I hope to achieve with my article is to provide a calm and sane explanation for why China is all of a sudden prioritizing its engagement with Israel and Saudi Arabia. I’m not necessarily endorsing each and every facet of Beijing’s policies, but nor am I condemning them. What I want to do is get everyone to think about what China is doing, and why it is doing it, and to arrive at their own conclusions. It is not for me to dictate how someone is supposed to think. All I want to do is inform the level-headed, open-minded, and well-intentioned members of the alt-media community (what I would like to believe are the majority of its constituents) about China’s latest moves and how they figure into its global calculus.

But having said that, if anyone thinks for a moment that China is “selling out” to the US by pragmatically working with Israel and Saudi Arabia towards its perceived vision of the “greater good”, or that it is “joining the Zionist and Wahhabi ranks” because it is hosting and signing deals with Netanyahu and Salman, then quite simply they are wrong. These kinds of people need to be removed from the multipolar community before they succeed with the Social Yinon Plan of deliberately dividing it from within and turning it into a Hobbesian collection of fratricidal factions.

DISCLAIMER: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.

First it was Australia, New Zealand and Japan, now the US is pressing the German government to refuse to use equipment manufactured by Chinese telecom giant Huawei as Europe’s largest economy seeks to build out its 5G infrastructure.

According to Bloomberg, a US delegation met on Friday with German Foreign Ministry officials in Berlin to talk about the security risks presented by Huawei’s equipment, which the US says is vulnerable to spying. The meeting in Germany follows a report from late last month claiming the US had launched an “extraordinary outreach campaign” to warn its allies against using Huawei equipment (while its vulnerability to Chinese spying has been cited as the reason to avoid Huawei, it’s also worth noting that the US and China are locked in a battle for who will dominate the global 5G space…a battle that Huawei is currently winning).

Germany is set to hold an auction early next year to find a supplier to help expand its 5G network. The Berlin meeting took place one day after Deutsche Telekom said it would reexamine its decision to use Huawei equipment.

US officials are optimistic that their warnings are getting a hearing, though any detailed talks are in early stages and no concrete commitments have been made, according to one of the people.

The US pressure on Germany underscores increased scrutiny of Huawei as governments grapple with fears that the telecom-equipment maker’s gear is an enabler for Chinese espionage. The Berlin meeting took place a day after German carrier Deutsche Telekom AG said it will re-evaluate its purchasing strategy on Huawei, an indication that it may drop the Chinese company from its list of network suppliers.

France is also reportedly considering further restrictions after adding Huawei products to its “high alert” list. The US has already passed a ban preventing government agencies from using anything made by Huawei. But the telecoms equipment provider isn’t taking these threats to its business lying down.

U.S. warnings over espionage are a delicate matter in Germany. Revelations over the scale of the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence, including reports of tapping Merkel’s mobile phone, are still fresh in Berlin five years after they came to light.

Huawei is pushing back against the accusations. The company’s rotating chairman warned this week that blacklisting the Chinese company without proof will hurt the industry and disrupt the emergence of new wireless technology globally. Ken Hu, speaking at a Huawei manufacturing base in Dongguan, cited “groundless speculation,” in some of the first public comments since the shock arrest of the company’s chief financial officer.

This news will likely not go over well in Beijing, which is still struggling with the US and Canada over the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver. In an editorial published Sunday, the Global Times, an English-language mouthpiece for the Communist Party, warned that China should retaliate against any country that – like Australia – takes a hard line against Huawei. So, if you’re a German citizen in Beijing, you might want to consider getting the hell out of Dodge.

Understanding the Holodomor and why Russia says nothing

One of the charges that nationalist Ukrainians often lodge against their Russian neighbors is that the Russian government has never acknowledged or formally apologized to Ukraine for the “Holodomor” that took place in Ukraine in 1932-1933. This was a man-made famine that killed an estimated seven to 10 million Ukrainians , though higher estimates claim 12.5 million and lower ones now claim 3.3 million.

No matter what the total was, it amounts to a lot of people that starved to death. The charge that modern-day Russia ought to apologize for this event is usually met with silence, which further enrages those Ukrainians that believe that this issue must be resolved by the Russian acknowledgement of responsibility for it. Indeed, the prime charge of these Ukrainians is that the Russians committed a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This is a claim Russia denies.

To the outside observer who does not know this history of Russia and Ukraine’s relationship, and who does not know or understand the characteristics of the Soviet Union, this charge seems as simple and laid out as that of the Native Americans or the blacks demanding some sort of recompense or restitution for the damages inflicted on these societies through conquest and / or slavery. But we discovered someone who had family connections involved in the Holodomor, and who offers her own perspective, which is instructive in why perhaps the Russian Federation does not say anything about this situation.

Scene in Kharkiv with dead from the famine 1932-33 lying along the street.

I can’t speak for Russia and what it does and doesn’t recognize. I can speak for myself.

I am a great-granddaughter of a “Kulak” (кулак), or well-to-do peasant, who lived close to the Russia/Ukraine border.

The word “кулак” means “fist” in Russian, and it wasn’t a good thing for a person to be called by this label. A кулак was an exploiter of peasants and a class enemy of the new state of workers and poor peasants. In other words, while under Communism, to be called a кулак was to bring a death sentence upon yourself.

At some point, every rural class enemy, every peasant who wasn’t a member of a collective farm was eliminated one way or another.

Because Ukraine has very fertile land and the Ukrainian style of agriculture often favors individual farms as opposed to villages, there is no question that many, many Ukrainian peasants were considered class enemies like my great grandfather, and eliminated in class warfare.

I have no doubt that class warfare included starvation, among other things.

The catch? My great grandfather was an ethnic Russian living in Russia. What nationality were the communists who persecuted and eventually shot him? They were of every nationality there was (in the Soviet Union), and they were led by a Ukrainian, who was taking orders from a Georgian.

Now, tell me, why I, a descendant of an unjustly killed Russian peasant, need to apologize to the descendants of the Ukrainians who killed him on the orders of a Georgian?

What about the Russian, Kazakh golodomor (Russian rendering of the same famine)? What about the butchers, who came from all ethnicities? Can someone explain why it’s only okay to talk about Ukrainian victims and Russian persecutors? Why do we need to rewrite history decades later to convert that brutal class war into an ethnic war that it wasn’t?

Ethnic warfare did not start in Russia until after WWII, when some ethnicities were accused of collaboration with the Nazis and brutal group punishments were implemented. It was all based on class up to that time.

The communists of those years were fanatically internationalist. “Working people of all countries, unite!” was their slogan and they were fanatical about it.

As for the crimes of Communism, Russia has been healing this wound for decades, and Russia’s government has made its anticommunist position very clear.

This testimony is most instructive. First, it points out information that the charge of the Holodomor as “genocide!” neatly leaves out. In identifying the internationalist aspects of the Soviet Union, Ukraine further was not a country identified as somehow worthy of genocidal actions. Such a thought makes no sense, especially given the great importance of Ukraine as the “breadbasket” of the Soviet Union, which it was.

Secondly, it shows a very western-style of “divide to conquer” with a conveniently incendiary single-word propaganda tool that is no doubt able to excite any Ukrainian who may be neutral to slightly disaffected about Russia, and then after that, all Ukrainians are now victims of the mighty evil overlords in Moscow.

How convenient is this when the evil overlords in Kyiv don’t want their citizens to know what they are doing?

“This day will go down in history as the day of the creation of an autocephalous Orthodox church in Ukraine… This is the day of the creation of the church as an independent structure… What is this church? It is a church without Putin. It is a church without Kirill, without prayer for the Russian authorities and the Russian army.”

But as long as Russia is made the “problem”, millions of scandalized Ukrainians will not care what this new Church actually does or teaches, which means it is likely to teach just about anything.

Russia had its own Holodomor. The history of the event shows that this was a result of several factors – imposed socialist economics on a deeply individualized form of agrarian capitalism (bad for morale and worse for food production), really inane centralized planning of cropland use, and a governmental structure that really did not exist to serve the governed, but to impose an ideology on people who really were not all that interested in it.

Personal blame might well lay with Stalin, a Georgian, but the biggest source of the famine lay in the structures imposed under communism as a way of economic strategy. This is not Russia’s fault. It is the economic model that failed.

Having initially snubbed Judge Emmet Sullivan’s order to release the original 302 report from the Michael Flynn interrogation in January 2017, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has finally produced the heavily redacted document, just hours before sentencing is due to be handed down.

The memo – in full below – details then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s interview with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, and shows Flynn was repeatedly asked about his contacts with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and in each instance, Flynn denied (or did not recall) any such conversations.

The agents had transcripts of Flynn’s phone calls to Russian Ambassador Kislyak, thus showing Flynn to be lying.

Flynn pleaded guilty guilty last December to lying to the FBI agents about those conversations with Kislyak.

The redactions in the document seem oddly placed but otherwise, there is nothing remarkable about the content…

Aside from perhaps Flynn’s incredulity at the media attention…

Flynn is set to be sentenced in that federal court on Tuesday.

Of course, as Christina Laila notes, the real crime is that Flynn was unmasked during his phone calls to Kislyak and his calls were illegally leaked by a senior Obama official to the Washington Post.